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Beetle B. writes "Do Google search results contradict your religious views? Tired of getting pornographic results and worried you'll burn in Hell for it? Are you Christian? Try SeekFind — 'a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible.' Muslim? Look no further: I'm Halal. Jewish? Jewogle is for you. NPR ran a story on the general trend of search engines cropping up to cater to certain religious communities. I wonder how many other 'filtered' search engines exist out there to cater to various groups (religious or otherwise) — not counting specialized searches (torrents, etc)."

That will only happen if someone is forced to use a religious search engine, but disallowed from using others.

That is assuming that the "someone" knows it is censored.

Vivismo's Clusty metasearch was bought out and renamed Yippy (http://search.yippy.com/). I used it for a couple of days before realizing it was filtering the search results. The only reason I found out the search was censored was that I ran a search where I knew what the results should have been. When I went searching for a search mode that would return accurate results, I eventually found the "Censorship" page (http://search.yippy.com/censorsh

It will, however, appear in the eastern sky due to the rotation of the Earth. There's enough evidence available for me to draw that conclusion. There isn't, however, enough evidence to tell me that there is a being that created everything, could control everything but chooses not to, could see the future but chooses not to, etc.

A Foucault pendulum [wikipedia.org]. It's only translational reference frames which have no absolute reference (if you and someone else are moving apart at constant direction and speed, you can't tell who is standing still and who is moving, or if both are moving). It's fairly easy to distinguish a rotating reference frame from a non-rotating one since rotation generates phantom centrifugal "forces" (consequently there is only one single absolute, universal non-rotating reference frame). These "forces" are what make a Foucault pendulum appear to rotate.

Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.

Nope, absolutely false. Many atheists are simply skeptics who refuse to accept the existence of the Gods unless you provide irrefutable proof. No blind faith required, any more than blind faith is required to not believe in unicorns or the tooth fairy. Furthermore, many atheists have investigated various religions in great depth--quite a few became atheists only with great reluctance, when their search for a plausible faith turned up empty. I say this as an agnostic, not an atheist, but one who knows many atheists. There are probably some atheists who are as you describe, but in my experience, they are a rare minority.

I was raised Episcopal, but figured out a young age that it was kind of bullshit. I mean, the church was basically started so a fat guy could divorce his foreign wife, even though divorce counts as adultery, which violates one of the 10 commandments. Being able to get away with violating a commandment doesn't seem like a good basis for starting a large protestant sect, if you ask me.

That lead me to eventually get to doing a study of Buddhism, particularly Zen. The books I read, largely from people in the Soto sect, just make it seem infinitely practical. I think a lot of people in the West get a sort of Beatles-in-India image of Eastern religions, but what I got out of Zen was that its the quest to be able to see things how they really are.

There is a Zen proverb I remember that goes something like, "Before you study Zen, you see the mountain. While you study Zen, you see the rocks and dirt. When you have mastered Zen, you'll see the mountain again."

I bring this up because it just seems to me that a lot of people get stuck on the "there is no spoon" and think that enlightenment is supposed to bring them to someplace special that looks like Rainbow Unicorn Attack. Really, its about cutting through the bullshit.

A lot of philosophy majors I knew in college were indistinguishable from the kids who would just get high and watch the Matrix. Sometimes they were one in the same. I don't claim to be an enlightened being or a Zen master, but I do think I'm pretty good at cutting through the bullshit and seeing the reality of situations. The world could use a little more of that.

Anybody who uses "outside the domain of science" to describe anything doesn't understand what science is. If there is a god, and it has any sort of measurable effect on the universe then it is within the domain of science. Because we can measure its effects. We can test various religions' prayers to see if they get answered at a rate different from chance.

We can compare various religions creation myths against what we know about the nature of reality.

Lots of things can be tested scientifically. If you give us a solid, meaningful definition of "god" then we can probably define a test for it.

Never go to a dictionary for a philosophical definition. It's sloppy, and the definition will always be wrong. In this case, the definition seems to have been deliberately slanted (I suggest you find another dictionary.)

As just about everyone else here has mentioned, gnostic atheism is very rare. However, most atheists consider the existence of God to be a highly unlikely proposition, because of the complete lack of evidence even though billions of people have been highly motivated to seek proof. In the abs

(A)gnosticism refers to what you know, and (a)theism refers what you believe in terms of gods. They are two independent dimensions. Think cartesian plane with one axis for theism and the other for gnosticism. You can be an agnostic atheist, a gnostic theist or everything in between. Gnostic atheists are hard to come by, but many gnostic theists are pretty loud about it.

The problem with your supposition is that you first create a supernatural world (that which we can not observe) and then label those who do not believe in it.

The fact that you first have to construct a supernatural world, then place beings in it, is what atheists disagree with you on. They do not disagree on your supernatural beings, they disagree with your supernatural world.If something can be observed there is no reason for belief. If something can not be observed in any way, other than some human being is convinced that something is so, there is no reason for belief. And the only reason someone is labeled an atheist is because the human being who is convinced in the supernatural world wants to put a label on those who do not.

This supernatural world can contain titans, gods, fairies, leprechauns, vampires, magic, etc. Currently, only the people who believe in a supernatural world filled with gods seem to feel a need to label the non-believers. And since this is apparently so important to them, I let them.

If you feel you can not cope with the natural world, and a supernatural one on top of it helps you, you are free to do so. It is when you start asking me to believe in the same supernatural world that you do, that I draw the line. Especially when the asking is done at the point of a sword.

I see religion as something that had a function in the past when we didn't understand the world around us very well and many things were an "Act of God".From the seasons, to eclipses to floods, to many other things have been attributed or still are to gods or mythical creatures in the history of mankind. Man is very good in seeing cause and effect in things, even if there is none. I think that is how mysticism and religion came into existence, as a need for mankind to explain phenomena around him that he didn't understand and could not predict. I even think it's what defines us as a species in the sense that we have always tried to figure out cause and effect and then use the knowledge to our advantage to predict the future.

I think over time this simple attempt at explaining the world around us evolved into a way to order our society when we started to live together in larger and larger groups. Successful religions usually seem to do three things: They offer a social structure, they promote procreation and they try to give people control over the unpredictable things in their lives.If you look at Christianity it's very clear that the current Church is very much based around these three cores.

I think in a way humanity developed religion as an evolutionary survival strategy that has proven highly successful.

Promoting procreation is the most essential. All versions of Christianity that were to averse to this (there were many in the first few centuries), have since died out. This is probably true for other religions as well, but my knowledge is less detailed.

The second thing is offering social structure. From Kings ruling by God given right, to clerical hierarchies to the Ten Commandments. Knowing your place in society, keeping those in power secure and giving rules to judge disputes by are the core of many if not all of the older religions.

The third thing hark back to how I think religion started. People do not cope well with uncertainty. Knowing that if you pray to the gods you will have a good hunt or bountiful harvest makes life predictable. And if things don't turn out well, you must have Sinned, failed to perform a ritual or something like that.

The last thing of course reinforces the previous, as the need for explanation and rules and guidelines helps keep the clergy in power.

Religion is a very powerful tool that humanity used in it's evolution. It is one of the big contributing factors that made us the dominant species on this planet. But I think that it has largely served it's purpose having been replaced by Science, insurance, law and newer forms of government like Democracy.

We now know that spring returns because of the orbit the Earth has around the Sun, not because we sacrifice an animal on midwinter.

Those that defend religion are proof of how powerful a mechanism it is and how good it is at defending itself and surviving. But they are defending something that is entirely constructed by man itself with no actual supernatural beings, powers or world existing. It has helped humanity survive and evolve but it's no longer needed, we now have better ways to organise ourselves and explain the world around us.

religion helps a believer to lead happy life and frees him from anxiety.

Really? Many religious people I know are intensely anxious because their religion teaches them that they're one false move away from burning in hell for all eternity. In fact, in many religions there is an attempt to reject our animal instincts, things that feel very natural for us to do, and threaten unimaginable punishment for those unable to resist our natural urges. That tends to cause a bit of anxiety and unhappiness.

Aren't you mixing duality and theism? Duality deals with an assumed distinction between body and mind (-> Descartes). Theism is a belief in magical superheroes. The one does not imply the other. Even if you were to convince me of dualism, that doesn't imply the existence of a god.

Anyway, there are some serious objections to dualism. If there is an immortal soul, there should be a mechanism by which it connects to your brain. How else can your soul perceive what your senses feel? So the claim you thought was so safe from science is suddenly under siege. Dualism, since it interacts with reality, should be testable.

In fact, the current data all points into the direction that the mind is what the brain does. This explains neurological disorders quite well. In fact, you can be a kind, honest, gentle person, but if I were to remove a specific, small part of your brain, you would become a lying, cheating son of a bitch. So if you have the misfortune of a hemorrhage and you become a bad person, after you die you get punished in the afterlife as well?

So yes, you can try to convince some atheists using those arguments, but it won't work on me. I ask too many questions.

I think most evangelical atheists are pushing back because so many religious folks are evangelical about trying to force the atheist to live the way the religious person wants. It would be a double standard to condemn pushy atheists and not condemn pushy religious, wouldn't it?

You know I'm fed up of this every atheist has blind faith thing...So if I state that I don't believe in any god then am I an atheist? This being different from saying I believe there is no god. The second statement requires faith, the first does not. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that I see no evidence for one therefore it doesn't make a point of my world view.Is lack of belief a belief? (except the belief in logical conjecture based upon repeatable experiment and evidence)

Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.

Nonsense! Rejecting superstition on the grounds that there is no scientific evidence is not blind faith, it is purely logical. Would religious people accept being labeled as blind faith atheists of other deities such as Thor or Zeus? As an example, Christians reject belief in countless deities, is it really so unreasonable to merely subtract one more deity from that list without being labelled a blind faith fanatic of atheism?

---"atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation"

not true at all. allow me to present myself as someone who has studied the synoptic gospels in far more detail than (and I'm guessing now) 98% of people who call themselves christian.

Re stating 'I Know', Richard Dawkins has a great thought experiment on this.

-Statement: There is a perfect Victorian china tea set orbiting the sun in an orbit about half way between the sun and the earth.

My position: I'm willing to say that I know this statement is false.

Nope, I haven't been to look and I don't think any rockets have gone to check. However from my understanding of the field, I am willing to take a position.

I could say 'I don't know'. It's possible that the Russians set this up as an elaborate joke. However at some point, saying 'I don't know' just becomes fetishism. It is useful to take a position when the opposing one is vanishingly unlikely.

The same applies to god. If you show me some evidence, then I'll change my mind. But from an examination of current evidence, I say that the existence of some involved creator is vanishingly unlikely.

Therefore I say that god does not exist and declare myself an atheist.

However at some point, saying 'I don't know' just becomes fetishism. It is useful to take a position when the opposing one is vanishingly unlikely.

So where's the proof that the existence of a god is vanishingly unlikely? I mean, with a tea set orbiting in space, the existence of such a tea set implies one of a small set of observably unlikely situations (note the word "observably"). The most likely explanation is that some country with an oversized space budget and sense of humour decided to plant the tea s

What about god? What observation tells us that he does not exist? Well, we haven't seen him, and nobody we know has seen him, but given his scope, he could be literally anywhere, in (or even outside) an extremely expansive universe. We haven't found any gods occurring naturally in the universe, but then again, the god that is claimed to exist by christians isn't exactly claimed to be common.

What about Space Unicorns [urbandictionary.com]? What observation tells us that they do not exist? Well, we haven't seen them, and nobody we know has seen them, but given their scope, they could be literally anywhere, in (or even outside) an extremely expansive universe. We haven't found any Space Unicorns occurring naturally in the universe, but then again, the Space Unicorn that is claimed to exist by believers isn't exactly claimed to be common.

What about Thetans [wikipedia.org]? What observation tells us that they do not exist? Well, we haven't seen them, and nobody we know has seen them, but given their scope, they could be literally anywhere, in (or even outside) an extremely expansive universe. We haven't found any Thetans occurring naturally in the universe, but then again, the Thetans that are claimed to exist by Scientologists aren't exactly claimed to be common.

What about ghosts [wikipedia.org]? What observation tells us that they do not exist?......

That would be true if you were arguing with a deist (which very few people are). Most religious people are theists and believe their god intervenes after the big bang at some point. That is where evidence is lacking.

The problem, speaking as an atheist (and also the light version of how I became an atheist), is not whether or not an invisible man exists, its whether or not the invisible man that you believe in (as described by whatever religious works you have) exists. Indeed, if you actually examine your faith, you will quickly discover that you don't believe in most of what your faith prescribes, that you have only accepted the parts of your religion that agree with your sense of self and culture and rejected the par

Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.

My perspective is that the simplest interpretation is likely to be correct. Maybe there is a god. Maybe god will send me an email one day or turn up on/. and say "you must do this". Until I will act as if god doesn't exist. A bunch of people who tell me that I should believe what they believe don't convince me of anything.

Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.

There have been plenty of investigation: physical experiments, attempts at communication, etc. None of them have ever provided any evidence that God exists. In fact, time and again, properties postulated for God by churches have shown not to be plausible. That is what "X does not exists" means; we apply the same standard to everything else whose non-existence we take as given.

Stating "I know..." about a thing that is, by definition, unknowable, is irrational.

Things that "exist" are observable, and hence knowable, as part of the real world. If something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist, by definition.

Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.

Next please, this one has no idea what he is talking about.

Semantics hint: Every sentence starting with "every" or any other all-quantor is by definition false. You are always able to find an exception. Yes, this is an intentional paradox.

atheism is often far less harmful than some religious notions, but it is no more rational.

1rationaladj \rash-nl, ra-sh-nl\Definition of RATIONAL1a : having reason or understanding b : relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason : reasonable 2: involving only multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction and only a finite number of times3: relating to,

If you were to bother... y'know.. investigating, you would find that a great many atheists arrive at that position following a great deal of investigation. Not scientific empirical experimentation necessarily, but certainly philosophical deliberation based on their studied observations of the world. After confirming that some arbitrarily large number of theist assertions appear to be untrue (e.g. the universe was created ~6000 years ago, God rewards faithfulness, Muhammad is the prophet of Allah), they co

Stating "I know..." about a thing that is, by definition, unknowable, is irrational. "I don't know...", on the other hand, not so much.

"Is," "is." "is" -- the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment. - Robert Anton Wilson

I didn't say anything about atheists. Most people believe that "whatever they see is not just a figment of their imagination", that's just common sense. Superstition is where you start drawing correlations where there is none, then reinforcing them with confirmation bias. If someone is having a bad day they'll just see it as a bad day. But if they have a bad day on Friday the 13th then OMG FRIDAY THE 13th IS SO UNLUCKEH!1!! etc

Another way to look at how technology does not equate with 'progress'.

Only because you are looking at the wrong end of the eye piece your using to judge society.

Are followers of bronze age religions who have learned to click a few buttons a sign of progress through technology? No.

Holding a chunk of technology in your hand that required 100 years or more of scientific research and study to develop does not transfer the progress made by the many people before the subject into the subject's mind through osmosi

It's a jokey website which is little more than a custom Google search. It isn't some kind of Jewish approved alternative to Google, probably because Jews aren't really that easy to offend. Want to draw a cartoon of Moses? Go for it!

It's a funny idea, but I suspect it's pretty hard to customize the search for every kind of believer. Some Christians have far more extreme standards than others in what they consider appropriate, for example. And they have very different ideas on what's "consistent with the bible". I notice that this search engine only returns results from icr.org, cristiananswers.net, gotquestions.org and apologeticspress.org. Might be useful in some circumstances, I guess, but I think most Christians will just use Google

There have been "vertical search engines" that only search within particular fields for a very long time now -- everything from cars to plumbing. Not sure how newsworthy it is that there are also ones for Christian and Muslim theology. Rather useful if you're looking up material to help you write a sermon, bible study, or for use in your own bible reading. There are also religious bookshops, selling religious books. So what a surprise that if there's a lot of written material around, someone's made a search engine for it. In other shocking news, there is a search engine exclusively for knitting [google.com]. Clearly its users must only believe in woollen dinosaurs!

There have been "vertical search engines" that only search within particular fields for a very long time now -- everything from cars to plumbing. Not sure how newsworthy it is that there are also ones for Christian and Muslim theology.

Did you read the article? This isn't about searching theology. This is a "general" search engine that filters out material not acceptable to their religion(s).

here [wikipedia.org]This WP article can be read in the context of the parent article in just so many ways. I particularly like "Church booleans are the Church encoding of the boolean values true and false", which could be taken as a sideswipe at the way so many religions distort truth and falsehood.

Your comment is particularly nice because, of course, Alonzo Church collaborated with Alan Turing, and both of those atheists would have been equally horrified at yet another example of the way that some so-called Christians see

there. i said it.millions of people around the world are suffering because they don't have access to information that is freely available on the internet, and still there are idiots out there who want to have their search results filtered.

ok, you don't wanna see a naked lady by accident. I get it. there's tons of things on the internet that I personally don't want to ever see (and I would do my best to keep children from seeing them). but if you don't want to hear what people with other convictions have to say in reasonable scenarios, then I say you're an idiot.

millions of people around the world are suffering because they don't have access to information that is freely available on the internet, and still there are idiots out there who want to have their search results filtered.

Having your information filtered against your will != choosing a filter for your information. Every time you use a search engine, you're filtering data, otherwise, it will just be a list of sites on the Internet. These sites just start with a pre-defined filter.

too much information on the internets! my fragile, horribly narrow world view is being damaged! quick, shelter me, opportunists!
i'm pretty depressed after reading this story. i'll have to go have a smoke before i can get back to work....

top ten resultsI don't know and neither do you.Believe nothing, question everything.There is no truth, only perception.There is no such thing as infinity.Organized religion is a bot-net.You are responsible for your own actions.There is no authority but yourself.If you think otherwise, you've been hacked.Give peace a chance: Nuke Jerusalem.Death to the fidels!

To me this is one of the common fallacies that is purported by religious folk: the idea that a God cannot be argued against since it is impossible to prove that he does not exist.

This is true only in a certain limited instance. This instance is only for a god that does not interfere with the world around us and, for all intents and purposes, does not affect it. The Christian god (and the Abrahamic god in general) does not follow this routine. The holy texts of these religions (and the followers themselves)

Having worked on experiments that helped prove the non-existence of specific particles (the 17 keV neutrino and the non-existent axion that hovered ephemerallhy in the wings of heavy ion experiments in the late '80's) I find this whole arguement bizarre in the extreme. Anyone who uses it on either side of the god debate is simplyh declaring their absolute ignorance of how science--which disproves the existence of things all the time--actually works.

The basic method is simple: if X exists, then under circumstances Y phenomenon Z will occur.

We then create circumstances Y and see if Z occurs. For bonus points we demonstrate our sensitivity to Z with various calibrations.

We do this all the time, both in the lab and in ordinary life. Whenever we do it with regard to anything other than god, no one takes any exception to it, and rightly so because it is an entirely unexceptionable procedure.

When we apply this perfectly ordinary procedure to "god" a bunch of wingnuts start equivocating between "evidence" (which is all we ever have in science) and "proof" (which is the exclusive concern of a very small number of extremely up-tight mathematicians.) And unfortunately a number of purpoted atheists don't call them on this.

If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?

Yes they are. Wikipedia sets a standard for NPOV that fundamentalists has no hope of comprehending let alone meeting. So they set up their own wiki which represents some of the nuttiest, illogical, nonsensical and laughably wrong articles you will ever see gathered in one single site. It's the motherlode of stupid.

If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?

Yes, they are. And one of the reasons they are is that they filter out evidence to the contrary. Having their own search engines just reduces the mental load, but one key point of all religious teaching is that you know the truth and everything contradicting it is false and/or a temptation by the devil (or whatever your equivalent is). So you train in filtering it out mentally. Having your computer do it for you is only the next logical step.

But without opposing views, your chosen view of the world gets ever stronger and - over time - ever more absurd. Do it long enough and you lose touch with reality entirely and start to believe in... I don't know, gods or some such nonsense.

Not in the least. However, I advocate discussing Intelligent Design. By showing kids how a scientific theory works in contrast to some made-up bullshit they would learn much better which is which. I would definitely confront them with the shit and let them rip it apart, applying the knowledge they have acquired until that point.

Opposing views can remain just that. I never said you should give all possible views equal credit or even just time. But what you shouldn't do is filter them out entirely, pretend that they don't exist, and set up a fantasy world around yourself where nothing critical or no other opinion even exists.

Pick another example if you want a neutral opinion. Being honest does not mean being nice or even neutral about everything, and neither does being rational, scientific, etc.. The verdict is in on ID, and it is precisely by not dancing around the fire but saying out clearly that what it is, that we are being honest.

Say it loud. It makes you sound right. You got that going for you. I like to wrap myself in being right. It's warm, albeit sarcastic. But it's assuring. Sarcasm without being right is somewhat empty feeling. Which is why people resort to insulting language.

Am I missing a few steps in this conversation? I think you lost me at the turn where you started talking about right and wrong without offering any evidence that would make a reader think twice about the general knowledge.

I did this many years ago. I built and maintained a yahoo style directory of Pagan and Wiccan websites called Omphalos. I added a search engine that indexed all the sites in our directory, using an open source search engine called UDMsearch. I had a pretty extensive index by the time I was done, and the site was fairly popular, given the small size of the potential audience. Sadly, I lost the domain name and then lost the ability to host it eventually, and the whole thing died. The domain name belonged to a squatter last time I looked (Omphalos.net).

It was a lot of work and took a lot of my time up. I still have a backup of the site itself somewhere on my HD I think. Certainly I have the old text files I had posted there from my BBS days kicking around. I am sure Omphalos must have been superseded by something better by now, but at the time it was the only pagan search engine.

I'm sure you guys have seen the "Christian Debt Financing" spam emails to trap the gullible. Imagine an entire search engine trying to scam you by pretending to share your morality.It may even start off with good ideals, but you can bet that after a short period of time that it's just there to shear the flock.

Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

A while ago I saw another Christian general search engine (I forget the URL). I tried a few searches on it, and it was absolutely pathetic. The results could not have been less relevant if they tried! That is deeply disturbing to me, as I believe that we as Christians should should aim for excellence in all that we do.

It looks like this Seekfind will be different in that it doesn't aim to be a general search engine. I could see some value in that, if you're looking for thoughts on specific Bible passages or whatnot from a Christian perspective. I suspect that users who use Seekfind for that would have no trouble using Google for everything else, so there is no need to claim that they are "sheltered".

However, what disturbs me about Seekfind is its apparent narrowness in what they deem as "Christian-enough." Apparently they will not index sites that describe end-times from an amillennial perspective -- which is the most widely held view in all of Christendom (not American fundamentalism), and they won't consider infant baptism (as we in the Presbyterian Church do) or even believers' baptism by sprinkling. What the? It would be much more valuable if I could find commentaries from various Christian perspectives.

I'm looking forward to searching them for creation apologist material. From a comment above it looks like they only cover the young earth think tanks. I bet there won't be any results from reasons.org [reasons.org], which IMHO has a much saner interpretation of Creation (they argue that the Big Bang is fully compatible with a literal reading of the Bible).

Archeological expeditions of the Holy Land depended largely on the Bible. Often, nations thought not to exists were eventually found there. So that there are facts in the Bible is indisputable. What they mean, what evidences they pose to the existence of God is up to the hearer.